


petals in the sky

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 6x01 Tag, 6x06 Tag, Angst, F/M, Pre-Season/Series 06, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 13:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19401679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: She misses the earth. The scent of dirt cloying at the back of her throat and the ease through her lungs of a fresh breeze. She longs for it, even the dense heat, clouded with trash, of central London in July. Anything but the dry recycled air of the Zephyr’s life support.//snapshots of twelve months in space





	petals in the sky

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea kicking around since the beginning of the season and I don't think I've seen anyone else do it so I thought I'd give it a shot. Writing this was kinda like pulling teeth, so I hope it doesn't suck completely.  
> Here's hoping tonights episode (which I haven't seen yet) didn't throw a sledgehammer into the canon of this!

_one_

When Jemma was a little girl, spring brought sunshine, brought the anticipated countdown to the summer holidays, brought days after school sitting in the garden with her Gran, watching the leaves on the trees turn upwards to the newly opened sky, helping the flowers to their bloom. She’d sit in the dirt, warmth seeping up from the ground into her skirt instead of rainwater, sowing rows of pea plants and carrots, weeding around the tiny beginnings of cabbages, listening to Gran’s explanations as she transplanted tomatoes started on the kitchen window sill, tying each vine to a stake in the ground. 

Jemma turned over soil with a spade, breaking apart last year’s roots, bringing the grey spindly veins to the surface along with rich, dark earth. The roots creaked as she broke them, like the chain on a swing set as it blows in the wind, she could feel it in her hand as they broke against the knife edge of the spade. Weeds, and the remnants of last year’s harvest, crumbling beneath her touch, making way for new life. 

Bringing nutrients back to the surface, that’s what Gran always said, as she hollowed out rows and ridges into the ground Jemma upturned. The soil was darker after she’d worked it, no longer ashen, drained from a winter of being rained on, stomped over by the kids in the neighbourhood as they made their way to school. She turned over rocks, each one she saw plucked from the dirt and tossed back towards the fence line, and weeds, piled into the pail Gran would take down to the compost, and earthworms, split in half by the blade of the spade, wriggling in the sudden sunlight.

She pulled it from the soil with a frown, the other half still and dead. 

Gran clicked her tongue, “Don’t worry, you’ve only snipped off the tail, it’ll grow a new one.” 

“Really?” Jemma studied the worm as it inched along the back of her hand. 

“Sure, take it home and watch.”

She ran down the street with it cupped in her hand, feeling it wriggle against the skin of her palm and put it in a glass jam jar, holes poked into the metal top to allow fresh oxygen and a handful of garden soil in the base

She was seven, her Mom was working double shifts at the hospital and her Dad had just gotten a new contract, so more often than not she was alone in the house. But that was fine by her, her little bedroom on the third floor was a haven. Tucked under the eaves, the ceiling slanted at odd angles to accommodate the roof, she was safe from the tortures of school, from the older girls in her class who rolled their eyes with half-turned backs whenever she answered a question correctly. 

A week later, after days of careful measurement, of charting each millimeter of growth, Jemma got the utility knife out of the drawer in the kitchen with the flight light and measuring tape and dead old pens. Up in her room, she set the worm down on her desk, fished it out of the jar. She pushed open the blade, lined the worm up against her school ruler, and cut.

An experiment is only viable if it’s repeatable. 

She misses the earth. The scent of dirt cloying at the back of her throat and the ease through her lungs of a fresh breeze. She longs for it, even the dense heat, clouded with trash, of central London in July. Anything but the dry recycled air of the Zephyr’s life support. 

_two_

Space, she decides quickly, is the ultimate ground for experimentation. 

Each day brings events she never thought she’d experience, and new data for the previously mundane. She’s a biochemist, albeit one with an extraordinary amount of outside experience, but in space she’s an astronomer, mapping the stars to find their way home, a physicist, to orbit them around Saturn, a mathematician, to calculate how much fuel it will take to get back to Earth. 

She’s an engineer when she’s the only one who can read Fitz’s handwriting. 

Amid superheroes, alongside agents, it’s her responsibility to apply method to the madness they find themselves wading into. To take care of the people around her, of the ship, and keep record, no matter what happens. 

She dolls out Vitamin D to Davis when he starts to get lethargic, starts snapping at Piper instead of teasing, and extra Calcium for Daisy when she complains about her joints feeling loose. 

Fitz will have to make new lights for the Zephyr. Create an ultraviolet-B bulb that doesn’t risk melanoma while still providing a sunlight mimic, maybe regulated with a kind of chronometer to prevent overexposure if they’re going to continue on longer journeys. 

It’s been forty-seven days since she’s felt the sun on her skin, since the ground has felt steady and firm beneath her feet. 

She runs stress tests almost daily, the crew – as she’s come to think of them now, rather than a team; it’s more accurate anyway – on a rotating schedule of treadmill tests and blood labs and physicals. They indulge her, as she pricks them with needles and sets the tubes for them to breathe through, because they feel sorry for her. She knows that. But when she goes to bed in the ‘evening’, when the algorithm she worked out for day/night cycles forces her to rest, it’s the data she sees behind her eyes, not him.

_three_

They return to Earth for supplies, at least that’s what Daisy insists. Simmons finds little ground to argue on with their defacto leader and the dropping number of RMEs. She pretends not to notice when half the crew piles their bags off the jet, she’ll fly the Zephyr herself if that’s what it comes to. 

While the others rush into the hanger, into awaiting arms and familiarity, Jemma stays stood in the cargo bay. She has no desire to spend an hour under the hot water spray of a proper shower, like Piper has been longing for, and her bed holds no desperate pull from the exhaustion weighing on her bones – not empty. 

“Refuel and resupply,” Daisy promises with a squeeze of her arm as she passes. “No more than 12 hours.”

The hallways feel hollow, despite being filled agents – ones she knows and new recruits; both look watch her with a mix of caution and intrigue as she walks to the control room. 

She doesn’t know why she expected solid ground to bring relief, to carry an easement to the tightness in her chest, the struggle of her lungs. The oxygen levels in the Zephyr are perfect, so is the artificial gravity, an exact Earth mimic, her pain has never been physical. 

“We found the ship,” she tells the wall of display screens. Mack stands beside her, a slump in his spine, his looming frame haggard. The last time she was in the control room she was shouting at him. Desperate tears streamed down her face, a crack of mania in her voice. “It was destroyed, he wasn’t there.”

“Daisy told me.”

Her throat closed up, her chest seized, she had the papers in her hand – his own notes on time travel, half-hearted ruminations and wandering curiosity – and was waving them at Mack, like they’d prove her point, like he could understand them when she herself could barely make sense of his impatient scrawl. She’d felt on the verge of death, like her heart would give out, a second away from collapse and Mack had taken her shouting with tears in his eyes and a steady spine. 

Now, she’s stoic, certain; her fear and pain securely locked away. “I’m sorry.” 

Mack sighs, she can feel his stare on her but she doesn’t turn. 

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t believe you.”

Distantly, she understands, everyone processes grief differently. But her skin is still salty with tears.

_four_

She cuts herself bangs in the tiny Zephyr bathroom, steam from the shower still clinging to the walls, her reflection shattered in the spider’s web of glass still clutching the mirror frame. Her hair falls in clumps to the metal basin of the sink, the bandage scissors she pilfered from the first aid kit shear, grate against every hair she cuts. 

The line she creates against her forehead is hardly even, but she can’t quite bring herself to care. It breaks up her face, when she’s done, leaving her looking both older and younger to herself. She hasn’t had bangs since she was a child, but there’s heaviness in her eyes, weight to her gaze that she never had back then. 

She stares at herself in the broken mirror, at the sharp angles of her hipbones that protrude through the skin, at the heavy marks of bags beneath her eyes, so dark they almost look like bruises. They’ve all lost weight, muscle mass due to lack of space and pounds from the meal replacements that tend to taste more like cardboard than food. She can fit her fingers into the spaces between her ribs now, each one settling in its own valley, isolated. In the shattered glass, from the refraction of the light, nothing connects those fingers to her arms. This body feels as unfamiliar to her as it will to him. 

She turns away from herself.

Daisy double takes when she passes her in the hallway back to her room, towel clutched around her chest, tucked beneath her arms. Without a word Daisy takes her hand, her skin is cool where Jemma’s is tacky, remnants of moisture still worked into the print of her palm. Daisy clutches at her hand like it might slip away, like Jemma herself might vanish to dust the instant her grip wanes. 

She sits down on the edge of Daisy’s bed – identical to her own – and waits while Daisy turns from her, rummages through the top drawer of her built in dresser that acts as the only storage in these little bunks. The whole bunk is identical to hers, they’re all the same, room enough only to take a step across the space, everything grey on grey. Daisy’s has life though, a red and orange quilt on top of the standard grey sheets, clothes spilling out of the drawers, and a collage of photos taped to the wall, selfies of them all, hanging out in the common area back in the Playground, scenic shots from all over the world, Mack grinning over the stove wearing an apron, her and Fitz in the lab, Lincoln. 

Daisy turns back from the dresser, a pair of salon scissors in her hand. “You did a pretty good job,” she says as she studies Jemma’s face. 

“I’ve never thought of you as a hairdresser before.”

Daisy shrugs. “Living in a van, I didn’t exactly pay for haircuts.”

“My mother used to do it for me.” Sitting on the counter in her parent’s bathroom, her feet swinging, heels thudding lightly against the cabinets, beside her the little bottles of oil that her mother would work into her hair with gentle hands after trimming the ends of her bangs out of her eyes that made her smell like the garden for the rest of the day.

She closes her eyes while Daisy snips, loses feeling of herself in the dark. Tiny bits of hair fall past her face, tumbling down to her lap, gentler than falling snow, like the ash, years ago, during their first bad run in with time. She flexes her fingers against her own palm, gripping the bones of her hand until they ache. 

Daisy measures out her bangs, two fingers of each hand sliding through her hair. “I think I might dye mine again, if I can get my hands on some colour.”

“I could mix you some.” Jemma says, feeling only the air leave her lungs and move against her hair. 

“Do you actually know how to do that?”

“It’s just chemistry. I did it once before.” In their first six months at Sci-Ops when Fitz thought that he’d look older, that their colleagues would take him more seriously, without his baby blonde hair. She takes a deep breath and opens her eyes to face Daisy. “What colour do you want?”

Daisy makes a sound of indecision, shrugs her shoulders. “Something different. Maybe blue? Or purple?”

“I could do that.”

Her fingers ruffle against Jemma’s forehead making the hair lay flat. “I think it looks good a little jagged.” She turns, back to the dresser drawer, riffling again. “Wanna see?”

Jemma thinks of her broken reflection, the hollowness in her eyes. She shakes her head. “I trust you.” 

_five_

Most nights she doesn’t sleep. The lights dim automatically, Piper and Davis and Daisy trade off shifts watching the controls and when it’s not her turn, she doesn’t rest. She lays in her bunk, staring at the slate grey ceiling as her eyes adjust to the dark. She stands in the lab, studying her notes on the latest planet they dropped down to. She sits in the engine room, puttering over the controls. 

Half her mind reaches out, searching for his hand to pass the wrench to, grasping for his mind to ask a question to, but the space is always empty. The other half of a sentence stays formed on the back of her tongue, squashed only by the forefront of her brain, the self-awareness in her mind that refuses to succumb to such madness. 

Besides, if she spoke the words aloud, let the question be unanswered, it would only hang hollow in the air. Silence that she already can’t escape made all the more obvious, demanding her attention, her suffering. A platform laid out for the grief she’s so effectively boxed away in the back of her mind, a place for it to come into the light and hurt her. 

But she can’t stop her subconscious, in the artificial darkness, as she tends to the machines she only understands because he made them, from supplying answers to the questions only he knows. 

_six_

She pours rubbing alcohol over the split open wounds on Daisy’s knuckles, ignoring Daisy’s wince, how the liquid splatters against the metal floor of the Zephyr’s cargo bay. Her hands are covered in dust too, red dirt from the planet they just fled, yet another where Fitz had never landed. 

Jemma clenches her jaw. “You should really be more careful.” 

Daisy hisses through her teeth, a low sound of pain that neither notices. Jemma flexes her fingers, examines the cracks in Daisy’s skin, seeping red blood, looking for traces of green goo that covered her hands when they returned to the ship.

“We don’t know how the native species biology would react with ours, or what if the host had a blood borne disease?” She thinks of static shocks, the desperate race against the clock for a cure, wind whipping past her face in a freefall.

“The dead alien you mean?”

“Yes, that.” Jemma grimaces. They’d tried to approach the native population peacefully, but they took their advancing ship as an invasion, and Daisy had no choice but to fight her way out. 

Jemma doesn’t even know the name of the species, nothing about their culture or biology. Their fuel is kerosene based though, which their engines will burn, and that’s all she needed to know to direct them there. She pours another splash of disinfectant, just to be triple sure the wounds are clean. “I have no idea what compounds make up their blood.”

“Do you think I’ll get super powers?”

Jemma looks up from her doctoring, finds a smirk on Daisy’s face, and shakes her head with a crack of a smile. “You’re more likely to get mad cow.”

“That’s less fun.”

“Yes, especially out here where we have limited medical supplies.” She reaches to grab a bandage from the first aid kit and wraps it around Daisy’s bloody knuckles. “There’s a limit to what I can heal out here. I’m not an actual medical doctor you know.”

“I know.”

Jemma rips off a piece of tape. “If there was a real medical emergency, I’m not sure we’d have time to jump back.” She smooths the end of the tape down and meets Daisy’s eyes. “Please, be careful.”

Daisy nods, her smile gone, expression now serious. “I know.”

_seven_

His hands were steady as he wrote, even though the handwriting he put down on the page was nearly illegible, that’s what Jemma first noticed about him. They were sixteen, perched on lab stools and he leaned over to write a formula for their advanced chemistry project among her notes. His whole body was nervous energy, the jump of his shoulders, rattle of his ribcage, how his feet wouldn’t stay still on the legs of the stool, but his hands stayed steady. His fingers wrapped comfortably around a pen with an old bitten cap, not tense, even as he worried the edge of the tan coloured bandage wrapped around his index finger as he thought. 

There was a crack in his first knuckle, the edges stretching out like a spider’s web towards the back of his hand, the skin dry and coarse. A scar across his palm, callouses on the print of every finger – his hands were lived in, worked with. They bore the evidence of hours spent planning and drafting and building. 

She knows those hands, with her eyes closed or her back turned. Gone deaf and blind she’d know the feeling of his hand slipped into hers, the feeling of utter certainty that they could conquer anything. 

_eight_

They fall onto the metal floor of the Zephyr’s back ramp, the screech of their pursuers still deafening. Jemma feels the blood in her hip, where a bruise will no doubt bloom. 

“Let’s go Davis!” Daisy shouts and the engines, already running, rev up. Her stomach stays leaded as the Zephyr rips upwards, struggling through a too dense atmosphere. 

The cargo bay door closes too slowly, a set pace, to expand the lifetime of the moving parts, but the aliens chasing are faster. They fly in a herd towards the gap above the closing door.

Daisy blasts them back, a wave of power that clears the beating mass but one makes it through, falling heavy to the floor beside Simmons, thrashing, leather-like wings beating against the Zephyr as it tries to gain lift once again. 

Piper smashes into it with a stray piece of metal and it falls still. “How the _fuck_ do those things fly?”

The door closes, the Zephyr lifts off. Beside her, Daisy slumps to the floor, body lax and chest heaving in relief from the proper atmosphere of the Zephyr. Despite her similar exhaustion, Jemma gets up, crouches next to the dead alien. Spread out, it’s wingspan is taller than she is.

“I’d imagine it has something to do with the atmosphere and the lower level of gravity present.” The thing is densely muscled too, it’s wingspan wider than it is long, which would help. She won’t be able to put together a proper hypothesis until she cuts into it though, she’s almost looking forward to the dissection. 

“It’s like a big bat,” Daisy says as she pushes herself to her feet, her face pinched up in disgust. “But with a coyote’s head.”

“I was thinking it was more along the lines of a kangaroo due to the musculature, but yes it does have similarities in wing structure to a bat.” 

“Well whatever it is, let’s get it the hell out of here at the next stop,” Piper grimaces. 

“First I’d like to take a look its internal mechanisms, see if we can learn anything interesting first.”

Daisy makes a face, like the one Fitz used to when she’d bring biological samples into the lab. “If you have to, but first I’m showering.” 

Jemma nods, analyzing the corpse at her feet while Piper and Daisy head up and out of the cargo bay. She won’t bring it any further into the ship than it already is, they don’t have the containment for that. 

“At least this one didn’t speak,” Daisy says with a shudder atop the upper catwalk. 

“The sentient ones still freak me out when they’re not humanoid,” Piper replies. “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to aliens.”

_nine_

“Jemma,” Daisy says, eyes cast downwards. 

Her heart stutters, her stomach summersaults into her throat. It’s the moment she’s known all along would come, the one she’s been waiting for: when the others decide it’s a lost cause. She’s prepared arguments, carefully crafted logic sits in the back of her mind – avenues they’ve yet to exhaust, probabilities, personal pleas – but they all die in her throat. 

“No.”

“Jem-“

“No,” she whispers, the tears that have made their home at the bottom of her throat rising. He’s still out there. She knows it, like she knows her times tables, like she knows the speed of light. She’ll find him. She’ll die trying. 

“Not yet.”

Daisy sighs, her own tears closing in on her. “Okay.”

_ten_

She wakes with tears in her eyes, sweat soaked through the sheets, her heart beating out of her chest and bile at the bottom of her throat that she almost doesn’t keep down. Her throat burns. Her fingers shake. She’s gasping for air, as if it’s been pulled out of the room, as if she’s been thrown out into the vacuum of space. 

It’s physically impossible for her heart to break but tears crack through her anyhow. 

She thrashes against the sheets caught around her legs and sits up into the cool dry air, pressing her palms into her eyes, trying and failing to keep the sobs down. 

It had been a good dream.

The air was heavy with summer heat, the shining sun making it even hotter. She could feel sweat pooling at the base of her spine, in the crooks of her elbows and knees, even beneath the oak tree they were laid out under. 

Campus was quiet, stilled by the heat in the air and the stagnant summer semester. Most of the Academy was gone, home or holidays or their own individualized research, but she and Fitz had decided it’d be best to stay on campus. To breeze through their easier requirements in summer classes and be able to work on projects together, instead of hogging the phone time with him in Glasgow and her Perthshire. 

It was their second year away and neither was homesick anymore, not when they had the other around. 

“I’m just saying that the coefficient was wrong so–“

“That’s not what I’m arguing Fitz. Clearly the–“

“Okay, I know, but-“

A soft breeze rustled the leaves above them and the pages of notes spread out around them. Jemma picked at the fraying edge of the quilt as Fitz argued the mechanics of a project she could no longer remember. But even in the memory she wasn’t angry, far from it, she felt at home. Content in a way she’d never felt before, just him and her and the science. 

“We should do this again sometime,” he said, smiling the gentle grin of the Fitz she last saw almost a year ago. “Maybe with a bottle of wine instead of those awful ciders we used to drink.”

Then she woke up. 

Then he was gone again. 

_eleven_

The air goes in a rush. Explosive decompression, her mind supplies, even in panic. Piper is shouting at Davis with the last of her breath and Daisy scrambles for the controls, to jump them out of range, to flee the Federation ship that has knocked out their life support. How it’s turned their technology against them she doesn’t know, only that the machines that usually sustain their Earth mimic atmosphere are now pumping in a vacuum instead. 

They should be dead. Fifteen seconds, that’s all before a person will lose consciousness, that’s all it takes for the body to use up its store of oxygen. It’s going on forty-five since she felt the first pull on her lungs that was from anything other than latent anxiety. 

She should be gone, passed out, rapidly approaching suffocation. But her consciousness clings. 

Part of her knew she’d die out here. That it was a suicide mission, an elaborate path to her own untimely death. That her will to find him would find a different way to actualize. 

She’s never believed in an afterlife, has always insisted that facts prevail, even as the smallest of children. But only now there are slivers of doubt. Small wonderings, however unscientific they are, that she can’t help but ponder on since his death. They’ve seen other planets, hell dimensions; they went to the future and came back. What else is possible that she never considered before. 

And if it was real, the heaven so many swear to, the hell he could never be sent to, there was hope. She could be with him again, no more fighting, no more chasing, just Fitz, and preferably forever. 

She hears the sound of the Zephyr making the jump, too loud, far from her ears. She reaches out a hand to him, wherever he is.

Darkness descends. 

_twelve_

The anniversary passes in silence. 

The others watch her, squirrely from the corners of their eyes, lurking at a distance like they haven’t for months and only when she looks at the display screen in the center console, at the Earth date stamped in the top left hand corner, does she realize why. 

She decides in an instant that she won’t observe this day. She won’t mourn him, won’t hide away or allow herself to break. This day isn’t real, it won’t mar his gravestone, he’s still alive, whether in this galaxy or the next makes no difference. 

Besides, she cried already. In the hours after Mack told her of his fate she grieved, there were hours, before she realized, where she’d sobbed and screamed and thought she’d gone insane. She’d felt his suffering, mourned for the Fitz who saved her from the future, who married her in a meadow. 

Any more would be frivolous, would be time wasted against the ticking clock, because he’s still out there, her partner, her best friend, the love of her life, and he’s waiting for her to find him.

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to 6x06 for being incredible and giving me most of the inspiration I needed for this. I do still kinda want to write a full fledged version of Simmons' "he thought I'd lost my mind, I had" line, but that's maybe for another day.  
> Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you liked it, let me know (and let me know your favourite part? I like four) I'm also on tumblr as @sinkingsidewalks if you feel so compelled to follow me there!


End file.
